Court allows PA school district to continue unwritten policy that violates student privacy

On Friday, August 25, 2017, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled that the Boyertown Area School District can continue to violate the bodily privacy rights of their students.

Boyertown school officials failed to respect the privacy rights that all students have under the U.S. Constitution and Pennsylvania law to use bathrooms and locker rooms without members of the opposite sex present. The court ruling late Friday, denying the relief requested by the students, will allow students of the opposite biological sex to use sex-specific facilities based on how they self-identify.

Jeremy Samek, Senior Counsel for the Independence Law Center and part of the legal team representing the four students involved in this lawsuit, had this to say:

“The district’s new policy permits a student to unilaterally eliminate the privacy rights of other students based simply on that student’s beliefs about gender. A person’s privacy rights are theirs and theirs alone. Beliefs about gender shouldn’t be a license to violate privacy inside boys’ or girls’ locker rooms and restrooms. That defeats the very purpose of sex-separated facilities.”

The legal team, involving Independence Law Center and Alliance Defending Freedom, plans to appeal this ruling.